USD/CHF Forecast: Dollar Holds 0.8117 With SNB Rates at Zero
- The dollar trades at 0.81165 against the franc, up 0.15% on the day and back in the middle of a three-week range.
- The Swiss National Bank's policy rate has sat at zero since June, leaving a carry gap of roughly 350 basis points in the dollar's favour.
- The 0.8093 long-term average is the line that separates this range from a fresh leg lower.
Fundamental Analysis: USD/CHF
The Swiss National Bank has held its policy rate at 0% since the assessment of 18 June, and its own conditional forecast puts inflation at just 0.6% in both 2026 and 2027. That is a projection with no tightening case anywhere inside it. The bank also repeated that it stands ready to intervene in the foreign exchange market, language it reserves for periods when franc strength is doing the disinflating for it.
Set against that is a Federal Reserve that left the funds target at 3.50-3.75% on 29 July, a fifth consecutive hold, with US consumer price inflation still at 3.4% year on year in July. The differential is the single largest structural support under this pair: holding dollars pays roughly 350 basis points a year more than holding francs, and that arithmetic has not changed all summer.
The reason the pair is not simply trending higher is that the franc keeps reclaiming its haven role whenever equity risk appetite thins, as it did through the first week of August. So long as the Fed stays on hold and the SNB has no room to cut further, the carry advantage is static rather than widening, and a static advantage produces a range rather than a trend.
Technical Analysis: USD/CHF
The 4-hour chart shows the move that defines the current structure beginning in late July, when the pair rolled over from 0.8190 and fell to 0.8045 by 6 August. The recovery from there was orderly, reaching 0.8145 on 14 August before a sharp reversal on 17 August took price back to 0.8085. The 20-, 50- and 100-period averages are now stacked within four pips of each other at 0.8115, 0.8114 and 0.8111, which is as compressed as this pair gets.
Resistance sits first at 0.8145, the August swing high, and then at 0.8190, where the July decline began. Support is the 200-period average at 0.8093, with the 6 August low at 0.8045 beneath it. A sustained close below 0.8045 would invalidate the range read and confirm that the carry bid has stopped working.
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